I’m pretty sure I got the job at Midnight Express because I didn’t ask if it was illegal. I wasn’t background checked, as far as I know. I didn’t sign any non-disclosure agreements. I don’t think they even asked for ID. My checks came from a casino in Delaware.
There was no office, just a warehouse near the airport. And there was no sign to identify it as Midnight Express—nothing official, at least. Sometimes, when we remembered, we’d print out the name on a piece of paper and tape it to the door. But those never lasted very long. Most of the time, there was just a torn crescent of paper where one of our signs used to be.
The job was pretty straightforward. I was at the front desk, which was just an ancient PC and a printer on a folding table near the entrance to the warehouse. My shift started at seven p.m. and ran until four or five the next morning. Lazlo called it the lobster shift.
It was just us two. On my first night, Lazlo showed me how to print the labels. “I don’t know why they have me training you,” he said. “I’ve only been here a few weeks.” But printing the labels was easy. And the only other thing I had to do was answer the phone. I was supposed to pick up and say, “Midnight Express—worldwide shipping, no questions asked.”
“You’re going to come across people wanting to send some weird things,” Lazlo said. “All I know is, they take that no questions stuff seriously. The guy before you got fired for asking someone if they wanted packing peanuts in their box.”
After that, Lazlo went off to run the forklift, and I was pretty much left unsupervised.
My first customer was a woman with a white box, not big. On the top, in calligraphic lettering, it said Mr. Chapstick, 2002-2017. Her cat.
“He always liked lying in the sun,” she said, as though that were the feature that distinguished him from all other cats. “And he ate my ferns. I’d like to send him somewhere there’s lots of sun and plenty of ferns.” I did a quick Google search.
“Costa Rica,” I said, careful not to put a question mark at the end of it. “Eight hundred species of ferns—more than the rest of North America combined.”
The woman nodded. She held the box in her hands and looked at it, at the calligraphy on the top. “I didn’t want him to get thrown out when I died,” she said.
“Of course,” I said, and waited until she handed over the box.
At about three that morning, a guy came in with a wallet. “I found this wallet on a Greyhound bus in 1978,” he said. “There’s twenty-three dollars in there. I borrowed from it a couple times, but I always paid it back.” He tapped the table with each of the last few words for emphasis.
I opened up the wallet. “There’s no ID,” I said. “No credit cards.”
“There’s a sticky note with a name on it in there somewhere.”
I found the bit of yellow paper. The ink was faded, but I thought I could make it out. “Thomas Jaworski,” I read.
“Right.”
Another Google search. There were about sixty Thomas Jaworskis in the United States, and a few more in Canada.
“I’ll send it to a Thomas Jaworski in Massachusetts,” I said. When you can’t ask questions, you find yourself sounding assertive.
“Do you have anything farther west? I always imagined that he was headed to California but didn’t quite make it,” he said.
I scrolled through the list. “I got a T. Jaworski in Reno,” I said. “No first name, just the initial.”
“Perfect.”
I boxed up the wallet with its twenty-tree dollars and sent it off. I even gave the guy a receipt. He said he wanted to frame it.
The last customer of the night was sending some new designer drug to Azerbaijan. She gave me some as a tip. I was too scared to try it, but Lazlo snorted some off the folding table after they left. He wandered out into the middle of the warehouse and lay down on the cold concrete, pupils dilating like an oil spill. Then he asked me to play Black Sabbath as loud as it would go on the old computer, which wasn’t very loud. Eventually he ordered three pizzas and left before they were delivered.
For the first few weeks, it was all things like that. Small things. I’d print the label, slap it on the box, and hand it off to Lazlo. It was never very busy. Lazlo and I spent a lot of time sitting around chatting. We got to know each other pretty well, I think.
About a month in, this couple brought in a trunk. At least I think it was a couple—a man and a woman, probably late twenties, early thirties. It was a big old steamer trunk, black with brass hinges and corners. It looked heavy. They struggled as they carried it up to my desk.
Lazlo was sitting on the forklift nearby, playing a game on his phone. He wasn’t paying any attention, but the couple kept glancing over at him like they were afraid he might hear what they were saying.
“Antarctica,” the man said quietly.
“Like the magnetic south pole,” the woman said.
“Anywhere you like.” I entered in as much information as I could and printed the label. Just as I was about to put it on the side of the trunk, there was a thud. The couple looked at me, like they were trying to see if I would say anything about it. I glanced at Lazlo, who was now looking over with wide eyes. I swallowed and finished applying the label.
The couple paid in cash.
Lazlo and I stared at the trunk for a long time.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“No.”
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“We should open it, right? Just in case.”
Lazlo shook his head. “Remember I said the guy before you got fired?”
“Yeah.”
“He didn’t exactly get fired. He more like disappeared.”
“We could just leave.”
“I don’t know. I think it’s some sort of test. I think we have to send it.”
I slapped a couple of Fragile stickers on the side of the trunk and tried not to think about it.
When he came in the next night, Lazlo sat down on his forklift and stared out at the warehouse. I could tell he didn’t want to do any work. Luckily, it was slow. A woman came by to send some rotten hamburger meat to her estranged mother. That was about it.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said after the woman had left.
“Go for it. I’m not a customer.”
“What do you think they actually do with this stuff?”
“Don’t know. Don’t want to know.”
“It’s just that nobody’s ever complained about stuff not getting to its destination. At least not since I’ve been here. And sometimes all I put on the label is, like, ‘that intersection where Pauly’s Café used to be.’ Or that guy who just wanted his label to say, ‘far away.’”
Lazlo turned his forklift on.
“I don’t think anyone knows or cares if it gets where it’s going. I think they incinerate it.”
Lazlo bit his lip and turned the forklift off. “Don’t say that,” he said quietly.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know anything about anything. But this stuff has to go through the system. What’s the point in having a system, if the stuff doesn’t have to go through it?”
Something was obviously making Lazlo nervous, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that nobody would ever really know if something went missing. It could be small. It could be junk. Just something to test it.
I started with an antique typewriter. A pimply kid wearing a beret wanted to mail it to Balzac’s grave in the Père Lachaise. It was beautiful—ivory keys like a piano. Stealing it was easy. I just slipped it into the empty backpack I had brought along that day. At first, I hid it in a kitchen cabinet, behind the colander. But when it became clear (I thought) that nobody knew or cared that it had gone missing, I took it out and put it on top of the short bookshelf next to my armchair.
By this point, Lazlo had stopped coming by the desk to hang out. He kept to his forklift and his pallets, headphones in all day long.
I never took anything really valuable—I wasn’t in it for the money. A broken surfboard, an AYSO soccer trophy, an old catcher’s mitt. A small hubcap that was all that was left of a much-beloved MG convertible. Wedding bands—dozens of wedding bands of spouses who had died or left. I kept those in the top drawer of a filing cabinet at the warehouse. When things were slow, I’d put them all on at once and wave at Lazlo on his forklift. He hated it, but it was just for fun. I was just kidding around.
On that last day, Lazlo drove up on his forklift and stopped next to the folding table. He got down and walked over, hands in his pockets. He could barely look at me. “You have to send this stuff,” he said.
“Has anyone ever complained? What difference does it make?”
“They told me to tell you to send it.”
“They? Who’s they? When have you ever seen anyone here but us?”
“The company is on your side. They gave you a job when you needed one. They didn’t bug you or micromanage. They just want you to send the stuff.” Lazlo took one hand out of his pocket and rubbed the back of his neck. I saw that he wore splints on two fingers.
“I don’t want to.”
Lazlo had an empty cardboard box on his forklift, extra-large. He picked it up and put it in front of me.
“I’m sorry,” Lazlo said.
And then I understood.
Tobiah Black is a writer and documentary producer. His writing has appeared in Sonora Review, Roanoke Review, The Public Domain Review, MORIA, and other journals. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Langan, their daughter, Oona, and their cat, Teefer Biscuits Smallman.